Background

MusicCritic is designed to transform online music teaching/learning towards a much richer experience for both teachers and students. It provides support technologies for music education, facilitating the assessment of student performances and the two-way communication between the teacher and the student for feedback. 

Using MusicCritic the teachers can easily analyze and assess student performances in various dimensions (intonation, rhythm, harmonic properties). MusicCritic provides flexible ways to create and asses tailored exercises. It supports rubrics and it can be personalized by the teachers. 

Based on advances achieved in recent research projects of the MTG on culture-specific music analysis (ex: CompMusic), MusicCritic provides technologies for supporting courses for different music traditions like Hindustani, Carnatic, Turkish makam, Beijing Opera as well as Western music genres like pop and jazz. 

With MusicCritic, we push the boundaries of technology to overcome the obstacle of physical distance (between the teacher and the student) and the massive demand in online music learning. 

Technology description

MusicCritic comprises a set of software tools to facilitate the assesment of musical performances. The basic workflow is (1) student records an exercise and submits it to the system; (2) the system sends the recording to the MusicCritic server where it is evaluated under the optional control of the teacher; (3) the outcome of the assessment, which includes the performing grade and the visualization feedback, is sent back to the system where the student can see it. This feedback serves as an objective performing reference that should help teachers and students better identify the learning problems.
 

MusicCritic includes four major components, two running on the client platform (LMS client) and two running on our servers. A part from these, there are the components with which the teachers prepare the actual exercises which are not shown in the diagram. Play: Interface embedded in the LMS client which allows the student to record and submit the exercises.   Analysis: Component in our server which analyzes the recording submitted by the student and extract meaningful musical features.   Assessment: Component in our server to compare the student exercises with the reference exercises and the established rubric of the teacher that returns the detailed evaluation of the exercises.   Feedback: Interface embedded in the LMS client which allows the student to see the feedback given by the assessment component.

Field /Topics

Music Education.

Applications

MusicCritic is being used to support online music education to help evaluate the exercises submitted by the students. Other applications can also be supported.

Benefits

MusicCritic technologies are ready to be used and are available as a software service that uses an interface standard (Learning Tools Interoperability) which is being supported by all the known Learning Management Systems and MOOC platforms. Behind these technologies there is a solid research and development support of the MTG team.

Status

TRL7: System prototype demonstration in operational environment  

Website

A demonstration of some of the MusicCritic technologies is available from https://musiccritic.upf.edu/

Contact

For any further information or licensing inquiry contact us.